The study examined the lies parents in China and the U.S. use on their children and discovered a difference in parenting when it came to instrumental lying — the choice to lie to children in order to make them do what their parents want or think is best.
Dr. Gail Heyman and her colleagues in the department of psychology at UCSD worked with 114 parents in the U.S. and 85 parents in China for their research, titled “Instrumental Lying by Parents in the U.S. and China,” which was published in the International Journal of Psychology in November 2012.
They discovered that 98 percent of Chinese parents used instrumental lying on their children, compared to 84 percent of U.S. parents. When it came to lying for the purpose of making the child feel happier, or about fantasy characters, the difference in percentages of parents lying was not witnessed by the researchers.
“Children sometimes behave in ways that are disruptive or are likely to harm their long-term interests,” Heyman said in the Sept. 22, 2009 UCSD News Center article “Lies My Parents Told Me.” “It is common for parents to try out a range of strategies, including lying, to gain compliance.
Researchers asked parents about specific lies they had told their children. Of the 16 instrumental lies researchers asked the parents about, parents in China reported a higher percentage usage in 15 of them. The instrumental lie of having no more candy in the house was the only lie that more parents in the U.S. reported using.
The two most common instrumental lies in both countries were threatening to leave the child if he or she did not follow the parent in public and promising to return and buy the child a toy he or she wanted on a different day.
Heyman also noted that more parents in China approved of instrumental lying than did parents in the U.S., while the reverse was true of lies about fantasy characters, such as Santa Claus.
The study acknowledges its limitations, including multiple differing factors aside from the culture, the number of children per family, the parents’ level of education and the proportion of mothers and fathers.
“Despite the limitations of this research, it helps to fill a void in an understudied area that may have strong implications for children’s social and moral development,” Heyman and her colleagues wrote. “These findings provide a descriptive basis from which to begin to understand the consequences of parent lying.”
